Painting is where internal and external experience mix. It’s a way to process and relate to the world, like conversing with a person or chewing food. My response to events is to bring them into painting, to interpret, to make them something I can see. By working—drawing and painting, turning things over this way and that, finding forms for nameless notions, inviting in accident and precedent—painting becomes a space of illumination. It’s a way to get past words. In the open space of the page, metaphors pop up like sudden jokes, fully formed and emblematic. Imagination here isn’t about escape or fancy; it’s a matter of engaging the mind's eye as an interpretive tool.
I use oil paints. It’s mesmerizing stuff, taking on endless qualities. It mixes so easily with the eye, ready to become something, as if it has its own desires. Looking closely into it shows something of the mystery of substance and image altogether, of how the material world conspires with perception, knowledge, and mind to make up our experience. I pay attention to the vitality of the paint layers and the movement of the surface. There are moments like “ah, I’ve seen that in so and so”—passages of paint that share in a lineage.
I paint with a range of historical approaches from the last 600 years, not to mimic a look, but as a practice. Technical investigation sheds light on and expands the creative process beyond notions of a naturalism or style. It connects with the insights and inventions that painters developed over a long span. There’s wisdom embedded in method and material. Painting is an outlook, a way of holding the world in awareness. Rather than just dressing up the ancients in modern clothes, I see these processes as incisive analytical tools, like finding an old hand-ground lens that still magnifies whatever I place it in front of.